Who would be the perfect actor to play the hot young Ivy League graduate who is suspected of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week? Some say Now You See Me’s Dave Franco should star. Others pick You hunk Penn Badgley. Oh, and American Crime Story maestro Ryan Murphy must produce, right?
Or how about not. How about Hollywood just leave this one alone?
Not that there’s any sign (yet) that production plans are in the works, but social media sure thinks a dramatized chronicle of these current headlines is inevitable — especially after social media pictures emerged of the chiseled young murder suspect, Luigi Mangione (those abs apparently deserve at least a three-part Netflix crime drama).
You can imagine a Hollywood version of this story: A smart Ivy League graduate who is in chronic pain due to an injury becomes increasingly frustrated with the American privatized health care system and decides to murder the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, striking a blow against a soulless insurance company monolith. Sure, he went too far — any depiction would dutifully make that clear. But haven’t claim-denying insurers also gone too far? It would all play like a dark character portrait; Taxi Driver for the social media age. “This is a complex story, guys.” Etc.
A documentary or two is inevitable. The unscripted space could fairly explore this subject, because documentaries can easily tackle a topic with a cold and dispassionate light. But what about a project of the scripted kind, where a story’s focal point inevitably becomes a mythologized protagonist, somebody whose point of view is inherently sympathetic to some degree?
That idea feels pretty cringe. As a crime story, this one is actually dull when you think about it — man shoots another man on the street in Manhattan and is caught a few days later. Your average episode of Dateline has more twists. Morally, I daresay, this story is also straightforward — anyone who guns down a defenseless person in the street has committed an act of evil and should go to prison. The only reason this crime became a media obsession instead of a one-day headline is because of the killer’s presumed motive — which seemed obvious from the start — and some of the public reaction, which is where things have gotten rather unsettling.
First, the motive: While Mangione is presumed innocent and facts are still rolling in, the suspect reportedly has a history of gripes against the health care sector and was carrying a manifesto that declared, “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.” He also wrote a review for a book by Theodore “Unabomber” Kaczynski that argued, “When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution.” This is essentially the same argument that every radicalized person uses to justify killing people — I’m doing this for what I perceive to be the greater good, so it’s therefore fine.
Second, there’s the reaction, which has been like something out of the 2016 Black Mirror episode “Hated in the Nation,” where tweets against unpopular public figures targeted them for murder. The New York Times says the suspect is being “venerated as something approaching a folk hero,” and a report cited by Wired found “many of the most engaged posts on X about this subject expressed explicit or implicit support for the killing or denigrated the victim.” In case you’re wondering if this is a left or right thing, this murder has apparently united factions of both. Mangione himself reportedly shared a mix of ideological views and interests (not that it matters). It’s hard to imagine the suspect, if guilty, isn’t thrilled with all the likes and upvotes.
One hopes this “everybody is siding with him” sentiment is overstated. Podcaster Ryan Broderick declared, “It’s possible that this is the most aligned America — well, aside from the folks in its highest tax brackets — has been about a news story since the invention of the internet.” But he’s likely mistaking America for social media, and social media isn’t actually two sides, but rather one — people who are opinionated, reactive and generally irate about things (along with throngs of agitator bots to help keep them riled up).
But here’s a thought: After Jan. 6., everybody on the left warned about politicized violence. After President-elect Donald Trump’s first (of two) assignation attempts in July, everybody on the right warned about politicized violence. Remember that? Now Webster’s word of the year: “Polarization.” These are fraught times. Nobody loves insurance companies, or heartless claim-rejection policies, but also: It would be very bad if killing people who ran institutions we don’t like becomes a thing.
You can pick any organization that makes decisions which might impact life and death and make an argument similar to Mangione’s complaint about health care insurers — from any major city police department to Boeing (which has been accused of negligence in two fatal crashes) to various government departments to social media sites (which have been linked to a rise in teen suicide) to pollution-releasing factories to food manufactures that include cancer-causing additives to idealized-in-the-U.S. nationalized health care outfits like the NHS in the U.K. (which have their own set of problems — up to 9,000 avoidable deaths each year). If you really want to kill somebody, there is an endless number of people working at institutions in modern life that you could point to and say, “Hey, they had it coming.” As Brian Merchant wrote in his Silicon Valley newsletter Blood in the Machine, the online reaction to this murder raises “the almost-plausibility of a world where killers select targets that will earn them the most online clout, if not crypto outright, and where people cheer in fury because their institutions have so utterly failed them.”
Mangione argues in his Unibomber book review that killing public figures to promote a perceived social good isn’t terrorism. But it’s precisely terrorism. And terrorism — particularly for causes deemed “justified” by a public mob who have expressed a flood of online bloodlust — can easily beget more terrorism. Again, Mangione’s alleged crime of shooting a guy in the street isn’t exactly some Bonnie and Clyde epic (a romance across a years-long slew of bank robberies), so any scripted Hollywood take invariably becomes some nuanced character portrait with his motive front and center. The denial of mythologizing celebritydom is probably a saner choice. Maybe let’s not rush to put an actor-as-Mangione on a film or limited series poster, even with that six pack.
